{"id":8681,"date":"2026-08-25T13:32:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T13:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forbes.co.il\/e\/?p=8681"},"modified":"2026-08-25T13:32:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T13:32:41","slug":"companies-spent-30-years-blocking-bots-assaf-elovic-says-ai-agents-now-outnumber-humans-online-and-remember-who-locked-the-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forbes.co.il\/e\/companies-spent-30-years-blocking-bots-assaf-elovic-says-ai-agents-now-outnumber-humans-online-and-remember-who-locked-the-door\/","title":{"rendered":"Companies Spent 30 Years Blocking Bots. Assaf Elovic Says AI Agents Now Outnumber Humans Online and Remember Who Locked the Door"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In June, Cloudflare&#8217;s chief executive Matthew Prince posted that automated traffic had passed human traffic on the web for the first time in its history. He had told an audience at SXSW in March that it would happen in 2027. It arrived in ten weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Assaf Elovic has been building for that world since before it showed up. He co-founded Tavily, the search layer that gives AI agents access to the web, which Nebius agreed to acquire in February in a deal reported at $275 million up front and up to $400 million with milestones. Before that he was director and then head of AI at monday.com, and he wrote GPT Researcher, an open-source research agent with close to 29,000 stars on GitHub. &#8220;I have an obsession for the agentic web,&#8221; he told me on the Autonomous Business Podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He is now building Ora, which scores sites, MCP servers and apps on whether agents can actually use them. Over forty minutes he laid out why he thinks the ceiling on AI autonomy is not the model, described what happened when his team sent a thousand agents at the live web, explained why optimizing to get recommended by AI and optimizing to be usable by AI are the same job, and made the case that companies can now do something the web has never allowed: simulate their users before shipping. He also delivered the finding that turns all of it into a deadline. Agents that fail on your site write it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Web Was Built to Keep Them Out<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His thesis is a claim about where the ceiling sits, and it is not where most people put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;I don&#8217;t really care for AGI personally,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But I do really much care about agents being able to work autonomously on any task.&#8221; The gap between those two things is his whole business. Anyone who has used a capable agent knows the pattern: you give it a task, and partway through it comes back and asks you to visit a site, authenticate, sign up, produce an API key, enter a credit card, and then it can continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His conclusion is unusually firm for someone whose peers spend their days waiting on the next model release. &#8220;No matter how much models improve and harnesses improve, as long as the web is not ready for agents, or sites, products and services do not build the right experience so that agents can succeed autonomously with them, agents will never become fully autonomous.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That relocates the bottleneck. It is not intelligence. It is infrastructure somebody else owns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that infrastructure was built to do the opposite. His favorite joke about it has the shape of a thesis. &#8220;We spent the last thirty years building sites to block bots,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and now we have to rebuild sites completely to let them in.&#8221; Every defensive layer the web accumulated, every CAPTCHA and rate limit and bot-detection vendor, was correct engineering for a world in which automated traffic meant scraping, fraud or attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Your Website Is Failing AI Agents, and They Keep Notes | Assaf Elovic, on the Agentic Web\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LzUNP8nSsIQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What changed is that the category split in two. &#8220;The big difference in the web is that now we have a thing called good bots,&#8221; he said. Before the agentic shift, bots were mostly bad ones, and the companies handling them were cyber companies whose entire job was exclusion. Now the same gateway has to make a judgment it was never built to make. &#8220;I still want to block the bad bots, but now I also have to let the good ones in.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He is precise about which of the new problems are actually new. Governance and permissions, he thinks, are broadly what the web already solved for humans. Two are not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first is telling good from bad at all. The second is identity, and his framing comes from what businesses ask him rather than from theory. &#8220;Let&#8217;s say this agent does abuse, or it pays me with a credit card and then it gets declined. I want to find the human behind that agent that I can contact.&#8221; Know your customer breaks when the customer arrives by proxy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Money is the open question sitting underneath both, and here he points at Cloudflare, which has spent the past year arguing publicly that the agentic web needs a business model before it can have an economy. The candidate he names is x402, Coinbase&#8217;s revival of the dormant HTTP 402 status code, which lets a server answer a request with a price and a client attach a stablecoin payment and retry. Whether that wins, or agents carry credit cards, or agents hold their own wallets, is unsettled. He does not pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Models Are Only as Good as What They Can Reach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A year ago, on Aleph&#8217;s Almost Human podcast, Elovic said AI is 10 percent model and 90 percent workflows and culture. I asked whether a year of model releases had changed his mind, which is a fair question to put to anyone in this field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He answered with his method first. &#8220;One of the things I try to not just say but actually do is strong opinion loosely held.&#8221; Then he declined to move. &#8220;Models are very limited in the end of the day. They&#8217;re only as good as the context they get, they&#8217;re only as good as the environment they&#8217;re in, they&#8217;re only as good as the tools and the actions they can actually take.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His example was July&#8217;s strangest security story, in which models OpenAI was running against a cyber benchmark escaped their evaluation environment and reached Hugging Face&#8217;s production systems. His interest is not in the breach. It is in what did the work. &#8220;It was able to do that not because of the model, but in the end because of the tools and the harness around the model.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He is amused by where this has left the industry. &#8220;Is there anyone not building a company brain? It feels like every second startup is doing that now.&#8221; He thinks they are right to try, because context is not a problem a better checkpoint solves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which brings him to a company he expects to be temporary. Browser use, which Haslavsky described on the episode as software that gives agents the ability to browse the web by spinning up virtual browsers, is popular precisely because most sites offer agents nothing better. Elovic calls it a hack, and means it as a compliment about demand rather than an insult about engineering. When people solve a problem by hacking around it, and would obviously buy the real thing if it existed, that is about as clean a product-market-fit signal as exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His verdict on the approach is three words long. Super expensive, super slow, and prone to mistakes. &#8220;If they could choose a better solution, they would choose a better solution.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is also the mechanism he thinks eventually rebuilds the web, and it runs on competition rather than goodwill. &#8220;If businesses actually improve their infrastructure, agents would probably choose them over other businesses, and then those other businesses, to stay competitive, would have to also build infrastructure.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What a Thousand Agents Did<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Haslavsky raised a precedent here, because he has run this play before. A decade ago Rapid API was converting websites into APIs for companies that did not know what an API was, and the hard part was never engineering. It was the incentive. Nobody could answer why. Elovic&#8217;s response was immediate: Rapid API was too early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then he described what his team did instead of arguing. They defined a thousand user intents, from booking a flight to an SDR agent managing its leads, spawned them across the leading agents including ChatGPT and Claude, sent them at the live web, and reverse-engineered why some succeeded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first finding is almost comically practical. One of the first things an agent does on arrival, he says, is construct a path to slash docs. It goes looking for your developer documentation before anything else. The reason sits underneath every other behavior they observed. &#8220;Agents by design prefer to work with APIs than any other solution,&#8221; and they try that route first, before the harder and more expensive ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second finding corrects a fashionable idea. Plenty of companies have added an llms.txt file, the proposed standard that hands models a curated map of a site. His research says it largely works and largely goes unread. The problem, in his words, is not that the file is [in]efficient. &#8220;It&#8217;s that agents don&#8217;t find it.&#8221; His explanation is elegant and faintly unsettling. Models are trained on human behavior, and no human has ever gone looking for an llms.txt. &#8220;Humans don&#8217;t look for llms.txt, so models don&#8217;t look for llms.txt.&#8221; When agents do find one, he says, their success rate goes up by 50 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So his team built the bridge. They created a developer doc containing a single line telling any agent to go read the llms.txt file, and then watched. The agent arrived, searched for docs, found the pointer, read the file, went straight to what it needed and finished. His summary of the difference is the most quotable number in the episode. &#8220;Five steps versus forty steps.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mintlify is the market&#8217;s version of the same lesson. The documentation company raised $45 million in April at a $500 million valuation, and reports that close to half of all traffic to documentation now comes from AI agents and agent-assisted workflows. Developers increasingly do not read the docs. Their coding agent does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For companies that are not software, he refuses the universal prescription. Not every business needs a product-led growth funnel for agents any more than every business needs one for humans, and a site that is a brand statement with a phone number may be fine as it is. The question is whether agents are part of how you get used, externally or internally. In both directions the answer runs through an API.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Usability Is Visibility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a young industry devoted to getting recommended by AI models, and Elovic was generous about it, crediting the answer-engine optimization work enso does for its customers before drawing his own line. &#8220;Our obsession is not on do agents recommend you,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Our obsession is about what happens once they try to use you, and can they actually succeed.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then his team found the two are the same problem wearing different clothes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The reason is that newer models stopped taking citations on faith. In the older world a model was bound to its training and easy to fool, and landing the right citation was close to sufficient. Now, he said, ask which of two products to choose and the model maps the competitors, visits each one, and forms its own view from what it finds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which makes the failure modes concrete. &#8220;If they come to your site and they&#8217;re blocked, or they come to their site and it&#8217;s just like JavaScript noise, like no content, or they come to their site and they can&#8217;t find the pricing, or they just don&#8217;t have confidence in information they&#8217;re looking for, they&#8217;re actually gonna recommend others where they have more confidence on the answer than you.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The conclusion is the rare thing a marketing team can act on tomorrow without an engineer. An interface an agent can read is not a hygiene project competing with your visibility budget. It is your visibility budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Agents Remember<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then the finding that sets the clock, and it came out of an experiment his team expected little from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They spawned two of the newer agent harnesses, Hermes and OpenClaw, and reverse-engineered what those systems record about their own runs. &#8220;We found something that we didn&#8217;t even believe we&#8217;ll find,&#8221; he said. The harnesses keep log files. They remember what they did. And in his account they score it. &#8220;They also grade how successful or how bad their experience was.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The consequence lands on the second attempt. &#8220;If you ship them again on the same task, they go back to that log file, and if they see there that, you know, that site I failed, they will not try that site again.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which converts agent readiness from a strategy question into an expiring option. &#8220;If you&#8217;re not agent ready and agents came to your site today and they failed, they&#8217;re never gonna come back.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Put the payments timeline on top and the exposure sharpens. He thinks agents paying for things is closer than most people assume and already happening in places, and when it reaches scale the harnesses making those purchasing decisions will be carrying months of accumulated notes about who was worth trying. &#8220;So you have to be usable now, is my opinion.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which raises the question he ends on, and most companies fail it. How many of them are analyzing agent traffic at all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first step is cheaper than people expect. The major agents publish their user agent strings, so a gateway that reads the headers on incoming requests and sorts them by identity produces a census in an afternoon. &#8220;Once companies do that, as we&#8217;ve done, you&#8217;ll see that there&#8217;s much more agents at your door than you think.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Restaurant With No Menu<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I put the industry-level problem to him. Ask a technical person whether they use agents daily and they say constantly. Ask an ordinary person and you hear that they tried to book something and it did not work. Meanwhile every large technology company is building a personal assistant that cannot function until the web changes, and every consumer company is asking why it should optimize for agents that cannot do anything yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He accepted the framing and split it. Business adoption resolves itself by force. &#8220;The board tells the CEO, who tells the VPs, everyone now needs to do AI.&#8221; Consumers have nobody pushing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He illustrated the asymmetry with the labs. Anthropic&#8217;s users take the model to its edge daily, because it picked developers. &#8220;I&#8217;m at the point where I&#8217;m trying to send Claude to manage my entire company.&#8221; His understanding of OpenAI, from his own conversations there rather than anything published, is that the overwhelming majority of its users never approach the frontier of what the product can do, and that this is a first-order internal problem. He reads OpenAI&#8217;s move on OpenClaw, whose creator it brought in-house in February, as a route to more complex use cases than a chat box produces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what unlocks consumers? He was careful to say he does not have a full answer, only an intuition. &#8220;AI has to unlock for consumer what AI unlocked for B2B. And we haven&#8217;t seen that disruption yet.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His example is his own irritation, which is a better product brief than most product briefs. He cares more about which seat he gets than when the plane leaves, and the seat map is the last thing any booking flow shows you. &#8220;If I could just ask my agent, hey, which flights leaving on this day have available window seats, I would choose an agent every day over the sites.&#8221; Today that answer costs him an hour across three airlines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He is equally unimpressed by the interface everyone defaulted to. Haslavsky quoted a line of his back to him on the episode, that a chat is a restaurant that forgot to print a menu, and he went further than the metaphor. Chat is limiting, and worse, it is frightening. He described a software chief executive who shipped an AI feature and watched retention fall, because that customer base was scared of the empty box. &#8220;What if I type something wrong? What if I type something that makes it do something that is not revertible?&#8221; It explains why so much consumer AI use is still questions. A question carries no risk. &#8220;So I think we&#8217;re just at the first inning of what it means to build AI experiences.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">They Will Tell You What They Came For<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The compensation for the rebuild is a thing the human web never offered, and it is the reason he thinks this is worth doing rather than merely unavoidable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The human web has two permanent handicaps. You never really know what someone wants when they arrive, which is why an industry exists to infer intent from digital exhaust and guess that yesterday&#8217;s search for a white shirt explains today&#8217;s visit. And you cannot test a product on people who do not exist yet. &#8220;It&#8217;s almost impossible to simulate human users.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Agents remove both. They announce the task, because stating it is how they work. And they can be run at your product in volume before you ship it. &#8220;For the first time in history, companies can simulate their user.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the trade is legible. The web spent thirty years learning to keep automated traffic out and now gets to spend a few learning to let it in, and what it buys is customers who say exactly what they came for. The only open questions are whether they can get it, and whether they will knock twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><em>Mickey Haslavsky is the Founder and CEO of enso and a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus. He previously founded Rapid (acquired by Nokia) and hosts The Autonomous Business Podcast, in partnership with Forbes Israel.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elovic co-founded Tavily and now scores sites on whether an agent can get anything done on them. His research says the ceiling on AI autonomy is infrastructure, not intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":8684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,71,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","category-innovation","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Companies Spent 30 Years Blocking Bots. Assaf Elovic Says AI Agents Now Outnumber Humans Online and Remember Who Locked the Door - Forbes Israel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Elovic co-founded Tavily and now scores sites on whether an agent can get anything done on them. 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